Reflection
by SeekerAstria
Summary: In the minds of the magically adept, fear and hatred can manifest themselves in the strangest of ways. Hrothbert sets out to prove a point, and it is a hapless victim who ends up facing the consequences of the young sorcerer’s indiscretion. TVverse.


Disclaimer - _The Dresden Files_ is the property of Jim Butcher and the SciFi Channel. No profit is being made from this fanwork, and no copyright infringement is intended.

Reflection

"Why?"

It was the question which Arthur, wizard by birth, teacher of magic by trade, hated to hear. And right now he was hearing it from the one student he disliked hearing it from. The one who would never leave an answer be if he could turn it into another question. He looked up from the manuscript upon the lectern to peer down his long nose at the boy sat at a desk in front of him. The only indication of Arthur's annoyance was his clenched fist, carefully held at his side. Not that the boy wouldn't pick up on his anger regardless. The young man, just fifteen, generally did with that unnerving and aggravating intuition he had for reading body-language.

"Hrothbert, I am talking, _do not interrupt_." He snapped, a little too peevishly but injecting just enough of a teacher's authority to get the boy to react. Unfortunately, the reaction was that Hrothbert's gaze merely flickered to the offending manuscript which had prompted the interruption, and came up lazily to meet the elder wizard's eyes.

"Yes, you were talking. And I am disagreeing with you. Well," He gestured expansively as Arthur opened his mouth to rebuke him, "I'm disagreeing with what the _text_ tells me." He clarified with a slight smirk. Oh he is smart, this one. Smart enough to think he's better than his teacher.

"May I ask what _precisely_ you find to disagree with in Sigfried's theory on mental enchantment?" The tutor asked with exaggerated politeness hoping to finish this quickly.

"It is inherently flawed." Hrothbert replied in a clipped tone mimicking Arthur's own. Though he wasn't sure how he'd picked up 'inherently', the wizard recognised that the boy had picked up the inflection from his father. Words were used with precision and without ostentation unless circumstances required it. If he so wished, the boy could weave from formality to playful japery in a matter of sentences. In one his age, it was but an acquired act, a form of pretence reflecting something of the man he might become. The change in tone, whether purposeful or not, was often surprising and Arthur had become convinced that Hrothbert, with his sometimes stylised proclamations and eccentric theories delivered in a manner which looked and sounded more at home in a playhouse then a schoolroom, acted out purely to vex his teacher. More often then not, he succeeded.

"Flawed? How so?" Arthur challenged, mentally rescheduling practical work for the afternoon. If Hrothbert was in the mood to talk, this could take some time.

"The man sees the mind as a _book_, and I want to know why."

There was an amount of scathing contempt in a tone which perhaps one day would find a far more attentive audience then Bainbridge's harassed teacher. Normally, Arthur was a man at home with analogy and metaphor, for one could not work magic without envisaging the abstract in physical terms. However, even a simple claim like this, when it came from his most belligerent and gifted student, could have its difficulties.

"That is one way of imagining the theory." he began hesitantly, "It claims that a wizard is capable of sorting through another's mind and memories much as one would turn the pages of a book. The individual mind is essentially finite, so this forms the 'binding'. The chronological nature of memory and experience gives us the 'pages'." He nodded agreement "A fair comparison. What is your point?"

Arthur noticed with surprise that his words caused Hrothbert to pause, fixing his gaze out of the window where a young man and woman were walking through the courtyard. The man was Edward, the son of the landlord at the village's public house. At sixteen, he was a veritable lout of a boy, who by all accounts did not treat women well.

After a moment, Hrothbert merely shrugged, "It….just doesn't make sense." He muttered distractedly, and Arthur heard "_he doesn't like her really_". It was uncharacteristic of him not to challenge his tutor without having some sort of argument. Arthur looked out of the window to where Hrothbert had been looking. The girl, Gwen, had been left alone in the square, looking rather forlorn. And now the boy's gaze had returned to her. Oh, dear….Well, at least a bit of _that_ sort of thing might cause Hrothbert to act a bit more like Arthur's previous students. It would be less of a strain on the teacher's nerves.

"And what has miss Gwen got to do with it? A witch, is she? Fancy discussing theories with her?"

"No! Of course not. You know you and I are the only wizards around here" Hrothbert muttered sulkily, but Arthur heard him sigh under his breath. He was telling the truth, of course, and few looked favourably upon one of the village's children being taught what gossip commonly described as 'arcane' knowledge. For the time being they were only rumours and not yet anything serious enough to bring the wrath of a suspicious populace down upon the heads of the wizard and his pupil.

With a sniff, Hrothbert turned back to his teacher; "You can't just simply travel through the mind as though reading text on a page, nor peel back layer upon layer of experience in order to gain an image of the whole."

Arthur flinched at these familiar words, clearly a memorised quotation. It was from an old magical text he had stored away in his office. The boy's translation of the antiquated Latin was close enough to Arthur's own that he knew where Hrothbert had got the idea from.

"What would you do, then?" He queried, abandoning the lectern to take the seat beside the boy.

"Look deeper. Look further, into what's really in a person's mind. Chaos. We don't think bit-by-bit or one page at a time. Everything happens all at once. Enchanting a man's mind shouldn't just be about putting things in order so we can read it. It should be about changing what's in there. Making it look like something else so it can be used well. An illusion in the mind. Deception." Hrothbert looked at Arthur gleefully, something burning fiercely behind his pale eyes.

"….And what good would that do? To deceive people like that? We cannot just tinker with a person's mind as though it were child's toy. People are what they are."

Hrothbert was pacing now, wringing his hands agitatedly as he spoke. "They think...all sorts of things and see so much. If a wizard can access a person's thoughts as he can understand their physical body, as we can do in thaumaturgy, then can he not...rearrange thoughts?" He paused, evidently having come to some conclusion;

"We _can_ change them because they are _not_ so simple."

Oh stars, the boy was grinning now, his voice seemed calculated to challenge and rebuke. Recently, it was those sorts of statements, absolute and imperious, of which Hrothbert seemed particularly fond. Arthur could not hide a grimace, as Hrothbert returned to one of his favourite subjects; using magic on people. It would be all very well if he looked at the topic the way most other wizards did. They accepted that people simply lived in the world of magic and mortality with some things one could explain and others which were just unknown. Some magic was allowed to be used on humans, other forms were prohibited. And that was that.

Unfortunately for Arthur's tidy mind, Hrothbert took a different tactic, his position being something along the lines of the notion that people could indeed be understood in all their minutiae and thus, and this was the part that made Arthur uneasy, could be i manipulated /i . But whether the boy meant it for good or ill, for White or Black, Arthur could not tell. It was a magical compromise between history and natural philosophy. A balance between how people affected the world, and what they i were /i . Arthur had in the past considered where these thoughts could lead, and was increasingly concerned. Frankly, the prospect terrified him beyond measure. The boy had great potential, no-one could deny that, but if it was not impressed upon him the corruptive dangers of using magic against others, then...

"The rules are clear. People are not to be used in that way. They are not _tools_, Hrothbert." He protested as calmly as he could manage, "It is not the place of a wizard to make choices about people in that way. We are but mortal, not spirits of the other world, nor gods!"

Hrothbert's eyes flashed at the mention of the word 'gods', yet another bone of contention for him in a discipline he seemed at once to both love for the freedom it showed him, and loath for its restrictions. Most young novices would consider the rule against using love potions to be enough of problem. Hrothbert went one better, and frequently declared that the entire _system_ of magic was somehow inaccurate. That rules, incomprehensibly to Arthur's mind, were made to be broken according to his own whims. Well now, if one wasn't expected follow the rules, then what were they _for_?

Hrothbert rose from his seat, walking over to the window. Sighing, he looked out with a small, secretive smile on his lips. Morning sunlight highlighted his black hair, and the similarly dark, fastidiously neat clothes he wore. Arthur swallowed and walked up to him,

"I don't know what you're thinking, Hrothbert, but please listen to me…." He was ignored.

"Strange, isn't it? We are wizards, we can become all-powerful and rule over the world as….human gods. Yes, I said _gods_." The boy smiled gloatingly.

"And here we are in this small place, learning from dry pieces of paper, from people like _you_" He stabbed a peremptory finger at Arthur's chest, glaring in increasing anger "who think that everything is neat, and fine as it is. _Well it's not_!" He snarled in juvenile anger, and in that moment a wind rushed through the room, strong enough to rattle the desk where he'd been sitting, and unbalance Arthur who was forced to lean against the stone wall, simply relieved that his scroll had not gone up in flames or that the rush of magic had not been directed at him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hrothbert stare open-mouthed at the reaction; clearly it had not been intentional.

"C-calm down." The teacher said hurriedly, "The rules are, are there for a reason."

"Then they are the wrong rules. There are other ways, they just have to be…found." Hrothbert insisted almost wistfully, all shock having vanished. His face was set into an expression of obstinate determination, but for a moment Arthur thought he saw something else in that gaze, something far more sinister then the rebellion of a confused child. And he remembered the words of his own teacher, long ago, that while most followed the Council's rules on magic, others found another path on which to achieve their desires.

"No-" Arthur gave up. Raising his hands in defeat, he pleaded;

"Think what you will, Hrothbert, but if you disobey the rules of the Council, they _will_ punish you for it. Is that what you want? How do you suppose your father would react if that happened? And regardless of what you might think of my opinion on magic I do not want to see one of my students imprisoned – or worse – for the sake of _research_!"

He stood back, alarmed to find his hands shaking and sweat prickling his brow. And yet the boy stood apparently unmoved, merely regarding Arthur as though he were a new and incalculable equation. It wasn't the first time Arthur had seen such a look on Hrothbert's face, but it was the first time he saw it broken by a shiver, and by the boy fitfully folding his arms around him himself as though he had, for once, scared himself with the abrupt display of magical power.

"We-we must return to your studies." Arthur ordered hoarsely, clearing his throat as though this were the end of the matter.

"No." Hrothbert looked up at him now, looking more his age then he had done since Arthur met the boy two years ago. He held his hands at his sides, fingers twitching in his anxiety. Arthur managed a weak smile wondering if perhaps the boy really was scared after all. He reached out to place a comforting hand on the boy's shoulder.

"Listen. You made a mistake, and that is all it was. We can go through this again later, and-"

Hrothbert backed away from him, a combination of panic and latent antagonism – even in his nervousness he kept his gaze fixed upon his teacher – which seemed even worse then his aggression only moments before.

"Not now. I have something which I need to see to. Something….I want to know."

"….Very well." Arthur watched bleakly as his student walked from the room.


End file.
